


A Thousand Ways to Say I Love You

by shreddedpatches



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bullying, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kidlock, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 01:43:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3510500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shreddedpatches/pseuds/shreddedpatches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim didn't always hate Carl Powers.  Actually, they were best friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Thousand Ways to Say I Love You

**Author's Note:**

> A few days ago, I developed a real hankering for Jim and Carl stuff, only to discover there's basically nothing written about the two of them. This really bothered me (c'mon, Jim started killing people because of whatever happened between them!), so I decided to maybe write something about it.
> 
> This is a series of drabbles and one-shots concerning Jim and Carl's relationship from beginning to end, strung together into something that looks like a story. I can't promise this will be chronological, so fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the ride. :)

The chlorine was overwhelming.  It was more than a smell: it kissed their skin and fought its way into their mouths and scraped their tongues with its teeth.  It was just a chemical, they told themselves, but deep in the most primal parts of their brain, they knew better.  The chlorine was death, and with every breath they took, they grew closer to choking on their own vomit, closer to the coroner squinting at them and sighing, “asphyxiation, most likely,” and turning away.

They could not forget the chlorine, but if they looked down from the raised bleachers where they sat, they could at least fill their senses with sight instead of smell and pretend they weren’t dying.  Below, seven boys were joking with their teammates and stretching and sweating and gearing up for the 200 freestyle, and they fixed their gaze on these seven boys, because these swimmers where what they had come to see, and because their only other option was to let themselves slowly suffocate.

One of the seven was about to be taken by the chlorine.  He was a skinny thing, tall for his age, with mousey brown hair that refused to lay slick against his forehead and a big smile that indicated an even bigger heart.  His friends swarmed around him, clapping him on the back and wishing him luck, although he hardly needed it: everyone there knew he was going to win the race.  He smiled at his teammates, laughing with them and flexing what little muscle he had in a display of power, because he knew he was about to win, too, and because it was so nice to belong to such a wonderful, supportive team. 

It was tragic, though, because the boy would dive into the chlorine and it would burn him from inside and he would never resurface.  No one knew, could warn him, could stop it. 

In the bleachers was a boy with dark hair and darker eyes, small for his age, pale enough to be declared unhealthy, with spindly fingers wrapped around a camera.  The school paper had sent him to document the tragedy, to etch the drowning in images that would last forever. 

Everyone’s eyes were wet—the chlorine made them throb and sting.  The boy with dark hair had wet eyes for a different reason: he _knew_.  He knew the smiling boy was about to go under, he knew everyone would say that it was the chlorine, it was an accident, it couldn’t be helped.  And he knew that he would take these sentiments to the paper and spread them to the masses. 

And he knew that they would be lies.

Most of all, he knew that he should do _something_ —should let someone know that a life was about to end.  But he also knew that he would never tell anyone, because he was a coward, because he was afraid, because it was his life that would end if he spoke.

Instead, the boy with dark hair tried to preserve the life as best he could.  He raised his camera and zoomed in on the boy who smiled, and he pressed the shutter down.

_Click._

_Click._

_Click._

The boy who smiled turned towards the boy with dark hair—unknowingly, for if he knew the location of the other boy, he would have stared straight ahead—and beamed, because he couldn’t help himself: he was too full of joy.  And the boy with dark hair snapped the shutter, captured that smile, made it immortal.

***

The bathroom hadn’t been renovated in over twenty years and smelled strongly of urine, but James couldn’t bring himself to care.  He was sitting on a nest of toilet paper, his back against the wall and his hands clutching a tattered copy of Machiavelli’s _The Prince_  that was cleverly disguised as a Tolkien novel that he had read years before.  The filthy stall wasn’t an ideal hiding place, but he had been caught in the janitor’s closet two weeks back, and he wasn’t ready to risk that again.  At any rate, the stall offered him protection from his teacher—he assumed that, as a female, she would rather avoid coming into the boy’s bathroom, and she certainly wouldn’t be willing to crawl under the stall door to drag him out of it, unlike some of the other boys at his school. 

The door to the bathroom creaked open just as James was flipping to the next page in his book; he froze immediately at the sound and let the page slip from his grasp.  If it was Kenneth and Rob coming to give him whatever small piece of hell they had dreamt up that day, he had no way to run—but then again, maybe he didn’t want to.  Maybe if he just let them hit him enough, he could spend the rest of the day in the nurse’s office and avoid fractions worksheets and pitiful lectures on the solar system and the confused glances of Mrs. Crawford, who couldn’t comprehend how a student with so much obvious potential could be so perfectly content to waste away.

She had it all wrong, of course—the same way she had it wrong about the sun not rotating and Neptune not having rings.  He wasn’t content, and he wasn’t wasting.  But that was neither here nor there. 

All health room fantasies dissolved when he heard the tapping of heels against linoleum.  Despite all efforts to hold his breath, the shoes headed straight to his stall in the corner of the room and then stopped.  Crawford was wearing a skirt today, and James could see the purple veins on her legs beneath her nude pantyhose. 

For a moment, she just stood there, and James could picture her—could picture the way she would cross her arms and shake her head and look down at him with eyes that would never understand.  Maybe she was waiting for him to offer up an explanation for running away, or maybe she was giving him an opportunity to leave the stall without being asked.  James did neither: he stared straight ahead and tried to brainstorm a better hiding place for next time.  He was running out of options; in the future, it might just be best if he walked home.

Home.   _Ha._  As if.

“James, recess is over.  It’s time to come meet your reading buddy,” Crawford said in her softest, most compassionate voice, the one that always made James want to gag, because any compassion she felt was a lie, and if it wasn’t, it was only there because the woman was stupid.  Just another big, fat, stupid, hardworking, moral, sickly-sweet adult who knew nothing. 

“James,” she said again, the concern in her voice rising.  “Can you open the door, please?”

“I think you know the answer to that,” he mumbled, gently closing his book and pulling his legs up to his chest.  No, he wasn’t going anywhere.  Ever.

“Your buddy is really excited to meet you.”

James snorted.  “ _Please._   If he’s excited—which he isn’t, by the way—it’s only because he’s never met me.”

“Honey, that’s not true,” Crawford insisted, and James felt bile rise in his throat.  He hated when she called him that—like she was his mother, like he was some charity case.  “You’re such a good reader, James—haven’t you been working on _The Hobbit_   this week?  That’s a pretty big book for an eight-year-old, don’t you think?”

 _Idiot,_ he thought.  He had read _The Hobbit_   when he was five.  Maybe he should have been impressed that she had noticed the jacket of the book he had been carrying around, should have felt good that she cared enough to look, but instead, he despised  her for not looking closely enough.  “No, I don’t think it is, really,” he said finally.

The door to the bathroom swung open again, and some kid—eleven years old, James guessed, going by the size of the trainers he could see under the stall and the weight of his steps—walked in, saw Mrs. Crawford, unzipped his pants, and relieved himself in the urinal while snickering and muttering something about “that Moriarty kid”.  He left without washing his hands.

Crawford, who did her best to be a proper lady, cleared her throat before speaking again.  Finally, she announced, “Well, _I_ think it is.  You’re the best reader in the class, James.  We’ve paired you up with a student who could really benefit from reading with someone as adept as you.”

“I don’t see what I’m supposed to get out of this,” James muttered sullenly.  Really—listening to some six year old stumble through Dr. Seuss instead of studying 16th century political theories in a grimy bathroom?  It was hardly an equal trade-off.

“James, honey, he’s not going to make fun of your accent, if that’s what’s causing you so much stress.  Miss Hanson says Carl is a very sweet boy.”

“Oh, really,” James groaned.  Crawford’s words did nothing to console him: he was hyperaware that teachers always thought their little students were far sweeter than they actually were—especially when said students were fresh out of diapers. 

“James, please,” Crawford begged, her compassion quickly becoming replaced with exasperation.  “I need you to come out now.”

James scowled.  “You can’t make me.”

“You’re right, James.  I can’t.” Crawford sighed.  “But if you won’t agree to come out, I’m going to have to call your father and let him know that this is the sixth time this month that you’ve left the classroom without permission.  Are you going to be okay with that?”

A bluff.  It had to be a bluff.  Crawford had seen the purple that would hang just above his wrist and just below his neck. She had to have.  She wouldn’t really do something like that.  She couldn’t—she wasn’t _that_ stupid.  And she wasn’t heartless enough, either; that’s why she hadn’t made the phone call yet—she wasn’t _heartless_ enough.

James stayed quiet, said nothing, waited for her to call it off and walk away.

“Alright, young man.  I’m sorry about this.”  Crawford turned on her heels and headed towards the door without pausing to look back.

“ _Fine_ ,” James said, panicking, almost shouting.  “Fine, fine, fine, I’ll go, I’ll do it.”  He pushed the door open quickly, the book that was definitely not _The Hobbit_ almost falling from his hands in his haste.  A stray piece of toilet paper peeled off his back pockets and fluttered to the ground behind him.

Crawford smiled gratefully.  “Thank you, James.  Follow me, please.”

And James did, begrudgingly, hoping beyond hope that the child he was about to meet was half as nice as Miss Hanson thought he was.


End file.
